The X3: Gold Edition is now available at North American retail stores, offering a big old bundle of space combat gaming, announces EGOSOFT. The X3: Gold Edition includes X3: Reunion version 2.5 (including the Bala GI Missions), X3: Terran Conflict 2.5 (including The Aldrin Missions), the X3: Terran Conflict Soundtrack CD, and X-Universe Personal Uplink access, which is part of the EGOSOFT online community allowing players to compare their X-Universe statistics with each other.

Kajetan wrote on Feb 20, 2010, 04:20:X2 und X3, nice looking as they are, they don't worked for me as a game. Theye were more work than entertainment, with all this clunky and overly complicated interface.

Yeah, I really really wanted to love X3.

But it really felt like a little too much on the work-to-fun ratio.

I think if I had had more time to sink into it, I could have been hooked, but it needed to have just a little better balance to keep me there.

I have that problem with some games that are probably awesome (The Witcher, I'm looking at you) - if I have to make a huge up-front investment of my time to get to the point where I'm hooked, you're probably going to lose me. There are a TON of great games out there, and I just don't have the time to sink a couple weeks worth of my fun time into every one of them to find out which are diamonds in the rough.

(And I give a LOT of games that are rough around the edges their due, believe me...but those games have something that keeps me playing long enough to see their brilliance.)